My spouse and I
stayed at the Doubletree Downtown Philadelphia for one night on a Sunday in
late December 2017. We reserved our room online, and we remitted Hilton HHonors
points for our stay. We checked in online the day prior to our stay, selecting
the room that best suited our needs.
The Doubletree
Downtown Philadelphia is located on the Avenue of the Arts, directly across
from the Academy of Music and near the Kimmel Center. If you stand on Broad
Street in front of the hotel, you can see the clock/bell tower at City Hall in
the distance. The hotel occupies a corner location, and its unique design
footprint provides most rooms with good views. In recent years, the hotel has
expanded from its original tower to also include an annex building that offers
all-suite units. Guests reach the annex internally by taking one of the four
elevators in the main elevator bank to the fifth floor, passing by the fitness
center and indoor pool, and using their keycard to access a hallway that leads
to the secondary building. The annex is called “Suites on 5”, which has its own
bank of two elevators. The hotel offers garage self-parking (no valet);
although administered by an external vendor, you can add the parking fee to
your hotel folio. (The charge was approximately $35 per night, although we kept
our car parked there for a few grace hours after our checkout time. If we had
parked in a non-affiliated garage around the corner on Locust Street, we would
have had to pay for each hour over 24 hours, so parking in the hotel garage may
have even saved money.
Hotel amenities
include a fitness center, indoor pool (with attached seasonal outdoor deck),
street-level Standing O Bar & Bistro/ restaurant, second-floor Balcony
bar/restaurant, and meeting/banquet room space. Perhaps the best feature of
this hotel is its four-story atrium lobby that provides a view of city life.
We reserved a
King Suite, and during the online check-in process, we selected Room 882. There
are two configurations for a King Suite, and we picked the version that
provided a window in both the living room and in the bedroom because the rooms
are wider and arranged side by side. (The alternate layout looked to have a
“shotgun” style arrangement, where the rooms are narrower and arranged in a
series one behind the other, with the living area not having a window because
it is an interior room.) Our suite was large, with a combination living
room/kitchenette area. The kitchenette contained a small apartment-size
refrigerator/freezer (larger than a dorm cube and a bar fridge), microwave,
dishwasher, sink, and plates/utensils/glasses but no stove or cooking surface.
The kitchenette was open to the living room, although separated by a small
table and two chairs. The living room contained a full-size sofa bed and two
armchairs, fronted by a coffee table and a desk/TV console unit. The bathroom
was “Jack-and Jill” style, which you could enter from either the foyer or the
bedroom. The bathroom was extra-large, with a combination bathtub/shower,
toilet, and single sink vanity, along with a lot of empty floor space. The
bedroom contained a bed with a nightstand on either side, TV console, and large
closet with mirrored sliding doors. Inside the closet was a luggage rack, iron,
ironing board, and electronic safe, along with bedding for the sofa bed in the
living room. Our suite was very comfortable and spacious, and we regretted
having only one night to spend there.
We stayed at the Doubletree
on New Year’s Eve, and the hotel offered some additional perks to its guests.
In the afternoon, a staffed table dispensed festive hats to partygoers. In the
morning, breakfast hours were extended to accommodate guests who had celebrated
late into the night. In addition, hotel checkout time was extended until 4:00 pm,
as was garage parking. The only drawback was that because part of the Mummers parade
route ran down Broad Street away from City Hall, taxis and Uber drivers could
not drive on Broad Street, sometimes forcing them to go many extra blocks to
get reasonably close to the hotel.
We enjoyed our
holiday stay at the Doubletree Downtown Philadelphia, and we plan to stay again
at the same time next year!
